Doctor Who_ Nightshade - Mark Gatiss [0]
Nightshade
By Mark Gatiss
Illustrated by Daryl Joyce
The Changing face of Doctor Who: The illustrations contained within this ebook portray the Seventh Doctor Who, whose physical appearance was later transformed when he was fatally wounded by gunfire.
His companion in this adventure is explosives expert Ace, a teenager from the 1980s.
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DOCTOR WHO: NIGHTSHADE
DOCTOR WHO: NIGHTSHADE
Editor’s Note
Author’s Introduction
Ah, nostalgia. So seductive. So dangerous. And so odd to Nightshade was originally written with a mature be feeling it for some of my own work. Nightshade, now audience in mind, and contains strong language. Some looking like the brittle-paged Tenth Planet I had as a kid, is characters also express racial attitudes prevalent in parts of fourteen years old! Like a child I never had. I remember it British society at the time the book is set. Nightshade may all so vividly. Seeing the Virgin writers’ guidelines in DWB, therefore not be suitable for younger fans of the series.
writing my specimen chapters, coming home for Christmas 1991 to find the fantastically encouraging letter from Peter Darvill-Evans, the agonising wait to see whether the New Adventures would run beyond the initial four books...
The idea for what was originally called Nightfall came to me on a long coach journey from Leeds to - would you believe Cardiff? - a city that was then a long way off becoming the centre of the Doctor Who universe. I spotted a sci fi novel called Nightfall so the title instantly changed!
The basic concept was this, wouldn’t it be fun if an actor from an old TV sci-fi series started to see in real life the monsters he faced in the programme?
At that stage, before the New Adventures had been announced, I suppose I dimly thought of it as a kind of play idea. A Play for Today idea, really. Although such things were extinct by the early 90s. I hadn’t long graduated from 2
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DOCTOR WHO: NIGHTSHADE
DOCTOR WHO: NIGHTSHADE
college and was living a precariously hand to mouth existence in a haunted house in Leeds (It really was! 97
Archery Rd. Go and have a look!).
I had yet to make any sort of mark in showbiz but, when I read about Virgin’s plans to continue the recently defunct Prologue
Doctor Who I felt in my bones: I CAN DO THIS. What appealed to me enormously, apart from the sheer thrill of being published was to have a shot at writing Doctor Who (the real thing, of course, was now impossible. Ha!). Not only that, but to write Doctor Who as I thought it should be done, effectively redressing what I felt to have been wrong with the programme in its later years.
All around the cluttered cloisters, musty rooms and high, As a result, what surprises me now, re-reading the book vaulted halls there was a deep and tangible hush. The only after so many years is how SERIOUS it is. Grim, in fact. But light in the virtually impenetrable gloom was of a peculiarly you have to remember that I was reacting against the sort of pellucid green, spilling out feebly from every heavy wooden garish Who of the late Eighties that I’d found an increasing door and misaligned stone. Everywhere, there was a terrible turn-off. Things were undoubtedly getting better, just when sense of stagnancy, imbuing the whole place with a fetid, the programme was cancelled, but there was still a sort of neglected atmosphere as though some great cathedral had muddled quality, an almost perverse refusal to tell a straight been flooded by a brackish lagoon.
-forward story that I found very frustrating. So I wanted From out of the cobwebbed shadows emerged a little
‘Nightshade’ to be an ultra-grim and horrific adventure in group of very old men, resplendent in their ornately the mould of favourites such as Genesis of the Daleks, The decorated robes.
Caves of Androzani and Frontios.
The least ancient of the group, a white-haired individual I liked the irony also that it was a story about the dangers with piercing eyes and a down-turned, haughty mouth, of nostalgia that was in itself, nostalgic.